Friday, April 07, 2006

bsdtalk030 - Interview with Devon O'Dell and Jason Dixon

News: The FreeBSD Foundation announces Java downloads.

Interview with Devon O'Dell and Jason Dixon at the LinuxWorld Expo in Boston.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What do you think are we compromising by using a GPL compiler (gcc) to compile BSD-licensed code? The input and output of a GPL program is not affected by the GPL at all.

Or do you mean you would rather have a BSD-licensed C compiler instead of gcc? In that case, I would say the quality of gcc outweighs the "restrictions" of the GPL. Re-implementing something like gcc is not exactly easy, so I don't see a lot of benefit from re-implementing it just so it can be put under a BSD license. Actually, it may be less work to convince RMS et al. to re-license gcc ;-)

Mr said...

I think the proposed GPL version 3 includes some clauses that a lot of people didn't like. One clause said that it couldn't be used to compile software that provides DRM, which does effect the output of the program. I assume that gcc will be released under GPLv3 in the future, but who knows what the final form of the new version will look like.